ze only a _natural religion_, the acknowledgment in pious living
of a God who, having contrived this natural world, has given it over to
the rule, not of priests and prophets, but of natural law. The
artificiality of its conception of God, and the calculating spirit of
its piety, make deism a much less genuine expression of the religious
experience than either the moral chivalry of theism or the intellectual
and mystical exaltation of pantheism.

[Sidenote: Metaphysics and Theology.]

Sect. 93. The systematic development of philosophy leads to the
inclusion of conceptions of God within the problem of metaphysics, and
the subordination of the proof of God to the determination of the
fundamental principle of reality. There will always remain, however, an
outstanding theological discipline, whose function it is to interpret
worship, or the living religious attitude, in terms of the theoretical
principles of philosophy.

[Sidenote: Psychology is the Theory of the Soul.]

Sect. 94. _Psychology is the theory of the soul._ As we have already
seen, the rise of scepticism directs attention from the object of
thought to the thinker, and so emphasizes the self as a field for
theoretical investigation. But the original and the dominating interest
in the self is a practical one. The precept, +gno:thi seauton+, has its
deepest justification in the concern for the salvation of one's soul. In
primitive and half-instinctive belief the self is recognized in
practical relations. In its animistic phase this belief admitted of such
relations with all living creatures, and extended the conception of life
very generally to natural processes. Thus in the beginning the self was
doubtless indistinguishable from the vital principle. In the first
treatise on psychology, the "+peri Psyche:s+" of Aristotle, this
interpretation finds a place in theoretical philosophy. For Aristotle
the soul is the _entelechy_ of the body--that function or activity which
makes a man of it. He recognized, furthermore, three stages in this
activity: the nutritive, sensitive, and rational souls, or the
vegetable, animal, and distinctively human natures, respectively. The
rational soul, in its own proper activity, is man's highest
prerogative, the soul to be saved. By virtue of it man rises above
bodily conditions, and lays hold on the divine and eternal. But Plato,
who, as we have seen, was ever ready to grant reality to the ideal apart
from the circumstances of its